If you don't mind me asking, what's the rabbanut?, BTW, what is Israeli Judaism like?, I've heard that the Haredi are actuall the minority, but, for some reason, wield a lot of power, do a lot of Israeli' adhere to Haredi beliefs?.
The Rabbanut is the state-sanctioned apparatus of the Chief Rabbinates of Israel. Back in the period of the British Mandate, the UK ran British Palestine as much like a British colony as they could, and so they instituted a system of Chief Rabbinates for the cities, and eventually, for the entire region, though in truth such a system is really not congenial to modern Judaism at all. The informal coalition of settler affairs and freedom fighter groups that eventually became the first government of the independent State of Israel paid little heed to Chief Rabbinates and the politics of the Orthodox world, because the vast majority of Jews settling in British Palestine were at that time deeply secular, and mostly Marxist socialists. They needed some cooperation from the Orthodox to make Israel's existence a reality, and so they unthinkingly permitted the continuation of the Chief Rabbinates as a useful tool for the secular government interacting with the "religious" (i.e., Orthodox) communities.
There is an Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi and a Sefardi Chief Rabbi, and both have a council of advisors who are the de facto rabbinical court of authority in Israel. The Rabbanut was given the authority to be arbiters of marriage and divorce, which is why there is only now beginning to be limited forms of civil marriage in Israel-- up until this point, if you wanted to be married, you had to go to the Rabbanut; and if you didn't want to deal with them, you had to leave the country, get married elsewhere, and come back with foreign certification of marriage, which the secular government would honor.
The Rabbanut has always been an Orthodox institution, but its earliest Chief Rabbis were what we might today call center-left Orthodox, whereas for the past couple of decades, the Chief Rabbis have been increasingly Haredi.
Thus, not only is marriage difficult in Israel, but divorce can be a nightmare, as the Rabbanut's interpretation of the halakhot of divorce is, unsurprisingly, both exceedingly narrow and increasingly strict. And, since the halakhah dictates that in usual circumstances, a woman cannot remarry (or, in theory, have sex with any other man) until she receives a
get (bill of divorcement) from her husband, who must voluntarily grant it, many are left in limbo by wishing to divorce cruel and abusive husbands who spitefully refuse to grant divorces, and the Rabbanut rabbinical courts simply shrug, and refuse to exercise any of the halakhic powers that rabbinical courts have to annul marriages or compel divorces. Some women have been
agunot ("anchored" or "chained" women, unable to secure a divorce, or remarry, or get on with their lives) for literally decades because of this.
The Rabbanut also try to interfere in social laws, to make it a crime to violate shabbat publicly, or for the cities to run public transportation on shabbat; they support Haredi efforts to segregate the sexes in public, or on public buses; they quash the rights of non-Orthodox Jews to pray in egalitarian ways at the Kotel (the Western Wall).
The Rabbanut also runs the state
hashgachat kashrut apparatus (the system of overseers and inspectors who certify the kashrut of restaurants and markets): and in doing so, they demand that business owners live up to an extremely rigorous and narrow Haredi interpretation of kashrut, which is not only complex but expensive for business owners, and they also charge usurious rates to license businesses as kosher. This is not only unnecessary by the halakhah of kashrut, but it is also out and out against a whole other host of halakhot.
Now the Rabbanut is trying to get into the business of deciding who is and is not a Jew: formerly, if one were to immigrate to Israel, one's status as a Jew was determined by the Ministry of the Interior. Now the Rabbanut wishes to control that: they will only accept conversions done by rabbis certified by the Rabbanut, only Haredi conversions, with proof the convert is living a Haredi lifestyle. If the person is Jewish by birth, they demand proof of Jewish ancestry, and (though they don't label it as such) proof of Orthodoxy.
The Rabbanut is doing their best to turn Israel into a theocracy. And while I am deeply in support of Israel being a Jewish State, I am vehemently opposed to it being a State for just some Jews-- especially when those few Jews would exclude the rest of us, and deprive us of our rights.
